A Final Statement on the Portland Timbers 2024 Season & A Longer Journey Ahead

We have the technology, we can deconstruct him.

I have two main goals for this post:

1) Closing the book on the Portland Timbers’ 2024 season with a handful (or so) of questions, ones that may or may not stray into the wilds of hypothesis. Don’t expect firm foundations like statistics and/or hard pitches for this or that player. To get one premise out of the way, 1a) I’m open to all kinds of fixes for what ails the Timbers, even as I accept I’ll be lucky to get three players and some tweaks to the coaching formula.

2) To serve as a preface for quick histories of every team that competed in Major League Soccer’s 2024 season (if with some really stupid twists). I’m still working on what each chapter will look like – e.g., lump the 29 teams into half-arbitrary categories? burn myself out by posting one chapter for every team, knowing full well that I’ll overwrite every chapter (and abandon the project)? – but my only promise is that the Portland Timbers will get the same treatment in the final chapter in that between-seasons series.

2a) I’m ignoring the New York/New Jersey Real San Diego FC United Burn Wizards (does San Diego’s team have a name yet?) because, to paraphrase a German exchange student who once berated me, they have no history. (The actual quote, and he was barely standing for this, but still said it to me directly, “you have no culture.” The same man used to say "sauber" every time he farted.)

My earlier post-mortem on the Timbers’ 2024 (aka, Timbers 2024 Post-Mortem, Part I) covered a fair patch of ground in terms of anatomy (the roster) and physiology (mechanics), so nearly all the points below look to bigger questions and beg further questions about how to fix them.

With that, sit and enjoy…what amounts to a second autopsy. Because the first didn’t return anything diagnosable. Won’t take long.

The Glass Menagerie, only more depressing.

1) Did Things Really Fall Apart?
I believe most people would agree that more than one thing fell apart over the final three games of 2024 – e.g., the home loss to Austin (who didn’t make the playoffs) FC, the home draw against FC Dallas (who did), the Decision Day draw at Seattle Sounders (where, despite the draw, Portland did not play well) and, of course, the utter skin-peeling face-plant in Portland against the Vancouver Whitecaps (covered succinctly here). The stuff about Evander venting and checking the exits bubbled over in the days that followed and we’ve since heard mutterings about Santiago Moreno showing interest in gentleman-callers from outside MLS. (Mexico’s Atlas is the only one I’ve heard, but do feel free to name others in the comments.)

The Timbers didn’t play like a happy, united team over 2024’s final few games, but seeing frustrations boil over into public view does make one wonder how long they’d been simmering – and at what temperature. And yet…

2) Was It Just the Same (Bad) Dream?
Am I the only one with the vague recollection that the Timbers have flattered to deceive in each of the last three season when they failed to make the playoffs? To review:

In 2022:
This one played out as if poured into a familiar mold from seasons past – i.e., they started slow and rallied late (stirring stuff too, especially the run of wins toward the end; can only imagine how cocky I/we felt) – but ended with two losses, the crucial one at home to Real Salt Lake.

In 2023:
After a bad stretch that extended from early March to (arguably) the beginning of September, only to have a (very) late seven-game unbeaten streak lift them back into contention. Plenty of scenarios would have seen them squeak into the playoffs that year, but Portland killed of their share of them by losing at home to Houston Dynamo FC.

Before moving on, one major detail bears noting: 2023 was the season that MLS’s front office decided to lower the bar for post-season play down to a piteous ninth place. With that in mind…

The thing I was looking for hear was a pattern/argument similar to the one laid out in Timbers 2024 Post-Mortem, Part I: that Portland was a genuinely mediocre team that did nothing more or less than play like one. Basically, they could beat bad teams, or even decent teams in a bad run of form, and mainly when they played them at home. Anything outside those narrow parameters ended in either a loss or an ill-timed, teeth-gnashing draw.

For what it’s worth, that framing holds surprisingly well over the 2022 season, but less so for 2023 – and, please, take this with the caveat that those seasons are nowhere near as fresh in my mind. A review of the 2022 Form Guide (with the RSL loss noted above not in the mix) shows the Timbers mainly beating teams that finished around or below them in the standings; and, again, most of those happened at home (as for the road games, did Portland win the Cascadia Cup at a trot that year?). As hinted above, their 7th place finish would have seen Portland qualify clean for the 2022 playoffs – going the other way, they still would have backed in to those playoffs (though not as hard as Minnesota or RSL did…damn, y’all).

Yes, I'd totally grab drinks sometime.

2023 saw the Timbers beating genuinely better teams out of the blue, if only down the stretch, but the fact the Timbers failed to make more of the two extra playoff spots on offer in the 2023 makes a compelling case that everything prior was simply…bad. Most of the regrets about Giovanni Savarese’s departure turned around personal affection for the guy; I don’t think anyone seriously questioned it, then or now.

So, what does all that mean? No idea. I only went through the exercise because I thought it might answer the question. I do know the Timbers went out and hired a new coach, so let’s kick around how that went.

3) Coaching v Roster
While Phil Neville’s name came up here and there, most of the notes in Timbers 2024 Post-Mortem, Part I picked at the players’ faults, foibles and, yes, even some upsides. And yet, the further I get from the 2024 season, the more I see Neville as the most readily fixable problem facing the team. To be clear, Portland’s roster has problems – an incoherent midfield tops my personal list, but it is fucking hard to argue the defense doesn’t need an overhaul or a searing unfucking of their collective minds (then again, I think the incoherent midfield magnified the defense’s weaknesses) – and I’m some combination of sure and hopeful that smart changes to build a better roster will be made between now and, hell, I’m open to the 2024 summer transfer window, if that’s what it takes to get it right…but doesn't that talk around the question of whether Neville has the chops to coach an MLS team that isn’t stacked to failure-proof levels? Also, he's not going anywhere anytime soon, so let’s go back to the sunny side of the street, shall we?

Setting aside the question of whether Evander or Moreno leaves this season (while wanting it to happen for science and naughtiness), Neville retains the greatest capacity to change the roster simply by changing, to name a few, finding a better, more effective way to line up the team, smartening up the way Portland moves the ball up the field, or something stone-obvious as changing the way they defend set pieces.

For what it’s worth, I think the current roster could have been better. Even with a learning curve thrown in, even with Neville saving some games with halftime adjustments, what I see when I look around the rest of the league looks less like a gap in talent than better choices in possession and movement and wiser defensive structures. To close out this section, your dice, Ned.

4) Some Farewells
I’ve long aspired to be better about posting (forgive the term, but…) obituaries for any Portland Timber who either departs or retires. At time of posting, only three players from the 2024 roster don’t appear to be coming back for 2025: Tega Ikoba, Mason Toye, and Marvin Loria.

I can sum up my thoughts on Toye and Ikoba fairly quickly – best of luck, sorry about the back, and was he really that bad?*, respectively - but Loria deserves a longer look for a couple of reasons. First, it’s not like he didn’t get a long, clear shot at making the first team. Over six active seasons with the Timbers, Loria logged 4,066 minutes over 47 starts and 109 games played. Rather than waste time picking at his stats (pretty slim, tho), I’ll just say, and without malice in any form, that I never saw anything in Loria that moved me to say, “that guy needs to start.” If I’m being honest, I can’t really remember the last time I got hot about seeing Loria’s name on the bench. If there’s an answer to what went wrong, I don’t know it. Could a team/system more adept at developing players made him a reliable sub, or even a starting player? Couldn’t tell you. The only thing I have to add to the above goes something like this: players like Loria come in go, not just in MLS, not just in soccer, but in every professional sport. I don’t know how many of them last as long as Loria did and, if I’m frustrated by anything around and about him, that’s probably it. (*I never got to see enough of Ikoba to answer this question, but those longer thoughts about Loria seem relevant to that conversation.)

Now, for the bow…

5) In Closing, A Question About the Future
At least one part of the All-MLS reviews that will follow this post (in some form) will include one question that sits in the middle of all of the thoughts above – specifically, what kind of team will the Timbers be going forward. As anyone who follows the league knows, MLS teams come in all kinds of shapes and flavors, but even that only really accelerated with expansion (in 2010? in 2016?), and the arrival mechanisms like designated players, GAM, TAM, Initiative U-22, and whatever the league comes up with next.

Those changes have created permanent ceilings for some teams – if for reasons that seem less obvious when you see those reasons fail to apply in other markets that look similar to the failing ones – but those same changes have caused other teams to fail in every way short of hanging up a for sale sign on the franchise and voluntarily calling the repo man. I’ll be kicking around those kinds of things in those review posts, one way or the other, sometimes in more ways than one, before circling back to see what lessons do and don’t apply to the Timbers.

Till the next one….